For the finals, µART is against APBTeam for the first round.Despite a shameful cherry throwing (only two cherries made it on the cake), µART wins the match and goes to the quarter finals.

In this second round, µART is against RCVA. But then the robot is too impressed and can't hold the stress. He got stuck while trying to blow a candle, what a pity and a dishonor... And no hope is to expect from the PMI! Well since he couldn't behave properly since a while that is not surprising.

This will be the end game for µART, but what an adventure and we are very happy to come so far despite the problems we encountered.

The evening will end with a petanque game with Microb under the rain... and not only petanque of course...

The fifth round will be against 'Vincibot' in the morning.The changes made to the PMI were successfull and µART will win the match with 139 points against 85.Once again, the robot made a very nice throwing of the cherries!

That leads us to the 8th position and we are therefore qualified for the finals!

The night is quite busy. The team is working very hard to make the PMI understand he has to avoid the other robots!!But the team is exhausted...

In the morning, 2 hours before the match, the PMI is dismantled.

But this will be useless... Impossible to find the bug that hinders the PMI to avoid the other robots. It defies reason: the beacons between the (big) robot and the PMI are identical! The code is the same, the hardware as well.We will try to find a work around: the speed of the PMI is reduced and the avoidance strategy changed. It's risky just before a match but there is no other choice. We will see...

Before entering the spotlights, the teams have to wait in a waiting area behind.

But of cours, it's much more chaotic when all the teams are coming at once, so a second waiting area is created before entering the building.The angels are here to manage the queue and make the teams wait more happily.

After this, the teams are dispatched in the waiting area behind the scene.

The first throwing was beautiful but the second one was a failure... The robot didnÃ­t catch all the cherries and could only thow 2 of them and he missed the cake!On his side, the PMI was not so great.... he pushed AlpobotÃ­s robot quite harshly. We got penalty points for that.But the robots collected almost all the glasses and we could reach 133 points against 49 and therefore we came to the 8th position.

Now we have few hours until the next match in the evening. We will try to improve the avoidance strategy.

The match was great: µART wins with 163 points against 37.That is a motivation booster, the night wasn't wasted.But now we have to continue to confirm this performance. Let's see how we do in the afternoon, 2 matches are planned.

Back to camp for some bugfixing...

After this second round, we come to the 13th position, now we will try to keep it and that's gonna be hard...

The team arrived on Wednesday around 17.00. The installation was quite quick: this year we will be alone at the camping. The team of ENSISA is not taking part to the event and the team of INSA Strasbourg will be staying on site.Therefore only one tent is installed with the table inside.

But still it was not so easy, the wind started to play with the roof of the tent which landed on the car.

Thursday was more productive, the homologations were successfully passed around 10.00.Then the first match took place against 'CRIG A' around 14.00.Unfortunately, during this match, the robots didn't even start!After this first round, we ended up at the 103rd position.

Back to camp for debugging...

The problem seems to come from the communication between the robot and the PMI (the second small robot).That's not something new since we already identified it during the belgium cup.

The night will be spent debugging this problem.

That's a joke for µART: after a first analysis the problem seems to come from a component dedicated to the communication: the UART!!After suspecting a coding error then a compilation error, it seems that it's a component design error, precisely on the batch of component we are using!We will have to find a work around for the next match, the night is going to be long...

Finally we won't spend the nigh alone, the INSA Strasbourg team will join us for the night to make some tests on the table.